Not our house, safe outside the floodplain,but even after weeks, when we returned,and weeks after that, the world said rotting—dead fishMosquitoes, big enough to carry knives,came swarming in the unrelenting air.We were lucky. The river lapped the otherside of the road, our neighbors, stayers, said.Thirty steps from our front steps to wherethe ground turned gray. Up the bluff and pastfelled trees to find, on the forest floor, shrimp,washed miles inland, cooked there in the swelter,brilliant pink. Fifteen feet abovethe usual waterline, a foot-and-a-half-longfish, its wide mouth wide and full of maggots.We had to look. We put our cameras away.In the papers, several days, they showed our road—weeks onward, river, the whole dead end of it.Get out, I wanted to say, get your thrillfrom other wreckage. This part is our own,the weird toxic water resting there,returning to us as well as cleaner waterthe tall pines’ crowns, the faded yellow linegone to sky, the public pier all sky—Not our house in any way that matteredthen. (Two summers after, the ceiling let slipa trail of rain.) But the air, still, thick,telling the wound in everything around us.
